Benoit Vermander discusses the complexity of the the various networks and actors when it comes to global climate change negotiations and environmental issues. How can these difficulties be turned into opportunities? How can cities take the leading role on climate change?

The Shanghai World Expo is coming to an end… Six months and around seventy million visitors after its launch, what will remain of this mammoth happening?

The most enduring legacy will be the reshaping of Shanghai, the dense metro networks, innovative urban planning and international outlook. Truly, this has been a coming of age event, and its effects will be long term.

Besides this, the event has been mostly a “Fair”, a kind of festival. Chinese people have been coming from afar to get glimpses of world diversity or just to enjoy themselves. For sure, there have been many group visits fostered by work units and other institutions, but it was somehow moving to witness the zeal of individual visitors, quite a number of them elderly people who were seeing in this event a once in a lifetime opportunity. I met with an elderly couple of photographers coming from Chengdu who stayed in Shanghai for a good part of the summer and visited no less that 150 pavilions…. As a reluctant visitor who painfully reached the threshold of 3 pavilions visited and found the experience already rather exhausting, I could not help to feel deeply impressed. Many Chinese coming from far away provinces were rising up at 5am so as to be among the first ones in the queue and were coming home late at night, only to then download pictures and comments on their blogs. Actually, I realized that telling your blog’s readers where you had been and what you had done was a major incentive in realizing such feast of sheer will and energy…

On the other hand, it seems that the foreign audience was much more modest than originally expected. And, for an event focused around green and sustainable cities, the final contribution to the future of city life seems to me remarkably modest. My overall impression has been the one of a show – a rather good show actually – that was played to the benefit and for the contentment of a Chinese audience happy for the “free gift” that such event was representing. The happening was well in line with what the Olympic Game had already been, and as successful in terms of image and organization.

Do world fairs still have a future? There will be other such events after Shanghai 2010, but the genre needs to be renewed. Shanghai has shown the concept’s everlasting attraction as well as the severe limits that such happenings are now meeting with. In any case, the city has now secured a leading role on both the Chinese and world scenes for many more decades to come.

On September 10, Romano Prodi, former president of the European Commission and former Italian Prime minister, was the guest of the Xu-Ricci Dialogue Institute at Fudan University, Shanghai. Together with Professor Melloni, director of the John XXII Foundation for Religious Science in Bologna, he was introducing to a Chinese audience the flagship project of the Foundation: a database regrouping the editions of all Ecumenical Church Councils, in all languages and writing systems in which they had been acted

What follows is a slightly abridged English version of the speech he pronounced in Italian on this occasion:

There is good news on the global front: China is more and more living up to its international responsibilities. The gradual reevaluation of the Renminbi, voting at the UN to sanction Iran and even moving cautiously on North Korea, all of this shows that China is increasingly calibrating its policies by taking into account their global impact.

China’s prompt recovery after the financial crisis had made some observers fear that China’s new assertiveness would translate into unilateral policies. The Copenhagen psychodrama heightened such concerns. Fortunately, these concerns currently prove to be exaggerated: China’s recovery is fragile, and the country knows that its sustainability depends on the health of the global economy. Friction with the US and France has been put aside. Chinese diplomats and policymakers are conscious of the danger that would represent an isolation of China, and are making their own the old American wish of seeing China behaving like a “responsible stakeholder.”

The recent move towards salary rises for Chinese workers also goes in this direction. Joined with the (still very gradual) reevaluation of the Renminbi it provides for a leveled international economic playground and the emergence of new economic players. Besides, as the World Bank has recently noted, Chinese enterprises still have huge margins of productivity to realise, which can more than compensate for the expense created by rises in labor cost. A fairer social system should go along with a more efficient economy – and a country linked to its partners through common interests that are progressively better defined and assessed.

As is the case with other countries, China’s policies depend very much on circumstances and conjuncture. Unwelcome shifts in style and orientation are still possible, especially in what looks like a new period of economic uncertainty. Still, recent developments prove that the gradual insertion of China into global governance called for during the last decade by Chinese and foreign scholars is bearing some fruits. These fruits might not be yet ripe, but signs of hope must be noted and valued: the new international order is not all about competition. Reason and cooperation can still help us to break though rivalries, misunderstandings and irrational behaviors.

Religions are not only made of rituals, creeds and cultural expressions. They provide different paths for one’s spiritual experience and growth. For sure, spiritual experience can happen and develop outside religions but religions provide written traditions, guides and beliefs that lead one along the way. Religions are not only spiritual experiences, and spiritual experiences are not only religious in nature. But there is a strong connection between the two.

Different religions provide different kinds of religious experiences. The way the Absolute is conceived, the cultural context where these religions grew or still the styles of prayers and liturgy proper to different religious traditions shape the spiritual experiences that a given religion allows. But this does not mean that one religion would allow for only one type of spiritual path, nor that there is no communication possible among these paths. Actually, spiritual experiences are also determined by the psychological characteristics of the pilgrim, or maybe, even more basically, by human nature itself. Said otherwise, spiritual experiences are anthropologically determined.

In fact, studying spiritual experiences in their variety makes us able to investigate both things at the same time: (a) the nature of Man as an animal capable of praying, meditating, and investigating what he cannot see or touch; (b) and also, maybe, the nature of the Absolute itself, since dialogue among different spiritual traditions might reveal common insights. For using a crude comparison, the nature of Man and the nature of the Absolute are the hardware on which can play the various “software” of the spiritual paths. Spiritual experience, when lived and reflected upon, has much to tell us about the ‘hardware” of human and divine nature.

Seen in this light, religious dialogue, when anchored into dialogue among spiritualities, is also a way to explore our common human condition. It is an investigation, a way of growing into one’s spiritual identity, and not only a way of building more harmony and peace among religions. When seeing interreligious dialogue as the cross-fertilization of various spiritual experiences, a few interesting insights might occur to us. For instance, spiritual traditions put a special stress on some basic virtues that are anchored into our everyday experience and that prove to be fundamental for starting the spiritual path: the most important of these qualities is to be deeply attentive to Life within us, to the Other and to the world. This is the way to develop “pure attention”, which, in many traditions, has often been defined as the essence of prayer. “Attention” goes along a growing awareness of the richness of the our world and of the inner mystery of the things and beings that surround us.

All spiritual traditions also develop a paradoxical language that mixes metaphor of “summit’ and “abyss”, of fire and water, of awe and deep confidence. They try to subvert our ordinary categories and experiences so as to open us to the novelty of the Absolute. They make us see the spiritual path as a pilgrimage that we are called to undertake.

A third characteristic of spiritual cross-encounter is that all spiritual traditions develop ways of transcending the limits of the Self, so as to abolish the distance between “subject” and “object.” They want us not to concentrate on ourselves but rather to open us to a transforming reality. Becoming more familiar with the object of our quest and being progressively and deeply transformed by it is one and the same operation. In this respect, spirituality is a form of experimental knowledge. It aims at experiencing and revealing the inner world within the external one by making us dare to be transformed by the reality we investigate. Spiritual writings can thus be seen as “maps”, as itineraries. Among them, mystical writings are of a special quality, as they are personal testimonies on life-long experiences that have led their authors to the very limit of their humaneness. Mystics can be seen as “explorers” on the boundaries between human and divine nature.

Finally, there is a post-modern twist in the way inter-spiritual encounters are lived today: many people do not live only an experience of inter-religious dialogue but also of intra-religous dialogue; they can internally refer to various traditions (for instance aboriginal religions and Christianity), due to the fluidity of cultural contexts. This can enrich their own spiritual experience and the one of all Humankind. Spiritual pilgrims do not live their experience for themselves alone but for the community of which they are part - and ultimately for the whole of Humankind searching for its nature and destiny.

[dropcap cap="T"]here might be nothing more difficult today than living a simple life…We live in complex, intricate and perpetually evolving social and technological systems, and we are supposed to understand them, to adapt to them and to conform to the various requirements that they impress upon us. For sure, new technological systems and the social networks they generate are supposed to be user-friendly, even 'fun.' Indeed, our capacity to adapt to them largely comes from our taste for all things new, from the thrill associated with innovation. However, the 'fun' of innovation often degenerates into new constraints, accrued expenses and increased complexity. The management of complexity has become an essential feature of our life, probably diminishing the time available for free and creative thinking.

As just noted, accrued financial constraints go with increased technological complexity. Simplicity of life becomes a dream, a mirage, and we do know that the burden of our needs and expenses alienates us from our nature and from the most basic pleasures of existence. The new entertainments that technology generates make us much less available for the simple joys of walking, listening to streams and to birds, spending time with friends or just doing nothing…[/dropcap]

The point here is not to entertain the nostalgia the past, to come back to a mode of life that, for most of us, has become unattainable. But “simplicity” can and must remain a kind of regulatory principle. When we are confronted with technological, cultural or economic choices, we are entitled to ask ourselves “will such a purchase, such a decision introduce more or less complexity into my existence?”… and to act accordingly. Simplicity might be less a state of things than a driving force. We can still be aiming at simplicity, thus trying to unify our life according to a few guiding principles.

Aiming at simplicity means that we do not want to be dispossessed of our life and our choices, and that we wish to remain the masters of our existence. Simplicity is to be found first and foremost in our head and our heart. Each time we see clearly that such or such a need is not vital for us, that we are still able to reform our life, to let it go, to resist the tyranny of the objects in our life, we are becoming more 'simple', more unified in heart and mind. Ultimately, 'simplicity' and 'freedom' are the two faces of the same coin. Making these values the cornerstone of our existence might require some sacrifices, but they are certainly worthwhile.

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Ultimately, 'simplicity' and 'freedom' are the two faces of the same coin.